Poll: Too hard...

[3615buck]

I had a cable connection last year and gave it up.
Returning to a 56K modem is a real pain in the...
I think I'll go back to a broadband connexion as soon as I get my motherboard back from Asus...
I think I'll go ADSL this time.

What do you think, cable or ADSL ?

 

[JimmyEatWorld]

depends on a number of factors...

how many phone lines do you have now (ADSL will knock that out of the picture)
how many people use cable in your area
are you willing to pay more for ADSL
How much do you upload (or how much do you host things)

The best deal is going to be Cable
The best performance is problably going to be ADSL, even though theoretically cable would be faster

 

[compuwiz1]

I think it depends on where you live and what kind of service you can get for the least amount of money. Cable boasts fast speed potential here, but when I asked some users how they were actually doing, it was lots slower than advertised.

I went DSL, instead and have been getting better results than my neighbors on cable. My DSL has been very close to what was advertised, infact faster at times.

 

[datalink7]

I have dsl. Happy with it so far.

 

[3615buck]

The price is about the same here in Belgium.

45$ a month.

Cable : 2 years ago, I reached speeds of 100-110 kbytes/second.
But it is now limited to 30 kbytes a second because many people now use it.
There is no max download.

ADSL : for that price, I have a 1 Mbit connection (==> max 125 Kbytes) and a friend of mine often reaches 100 Kbytes a second.
Max monthly download : 10 Gbytes.

 

[TwoFace]

3615buck, you say you're in Belgium ... am I right to assume your cable would be Chello/UPC?!? I've never heard much good about them (I'm in Norway and Chello/UPC are the biggest cable company here too). There are some people from Belgium around here (I only know one, but with 50k+ members I bet there are more) maybe you should try contacting some of them to hear what they've got to say? That max limit on downloads for ADSL sounds nasty tho'

Generally I would recommend xDSL since you have dedicated bandwidth to your ISP, but as was said by compuwiz1 it depends on what is best where you are... Hope you get away from that nasty 56k connection tho' modems are suck :| (compared to both cable and xDSL)

Two-Face
My stats:
RC5
OGR-25
Seti
Gamma Flux

 

[Hawkeye_(BEL)]

I see you live in Brussels, and I live in Brussels too.

So basicly, you have two options : Belgacom Turboline (or the same from KPN Belgium through Planet Internet), and Chello.

You are correct, two years ago, Chello was the fastest ISP in Belgium, offering 1Mbit connections for only $43. They capped it to 300/64Kbit/sec, because of the overuse.

But, just recently, they upped the speed again to 512/128. So you get speeds of ~50-60Kb/sec (and you usally HAVE this speed, at least from the servers I frequent) for downloads and ~12Kb/sec for uploads, for the same amount of money. You also don't have a download limit. Chello's service has improved too recently (few disconnects), and as a customer, I can say I'm happy. The only thing that's bottering me is that they close all ports below 1024 to the external network. So running an FTP or HTTP server is out of the question, unless you do some portforwarding to non-standard posts.


As for Turboline. I have two friends that use it, and if I look at their experience with it, I wouldn't buy it. You have that 10Gb limit. Granted, they don't enforce it yet, but news is out they will soon enough. You have to login everytime you want to connect to the net, and that bites (their login server is overused during peak hours). Furthermore, they disconnect you every 36 hours, to avoid their customers will run servers. That's why they let all ports open, but they're of not much use if you can't make sure you'll keep your IP every 36 hours.

The speed of Turboline is just a tad faster, namely 768Kbit/sec and a 128Kbit/sec upload. That's ~100Kb/sec and ~12Kb/sec. Now, both my friends usually don't get to 100Kb/sec, only if they download from their ISP.

You should also know that Turboline is a service for the entire country, and Chello is only operational in Brussels and Leuven, so there are usually less users on Chello than on Turboline at any given time.

This if my opinion of course, and it may differ to other people's opinion. So that's why I advise you to take a look at usenet. Read and post some questions on the Belgian Usenet groups, they're quite active for such a small country. be.comp.internet and be.providers are the groups that'll interest you the most.

I hope this has been of help